THE GRA.FO PROJECT AND THE NEW GRA.FO PANEL: TOOLS

THE GRA.FO PROJECT AND THE NEW GRA.FO PANEL: TOOLS FOR
DIGITIZATION, STORAGE AND CATALOGUING OF ORAL ARCHIVES
Irene Ricci1, Chiara Bertini1, Francesca Biliotti2, Silvia Calamai2, Dei Rossi3
1
Scuola Normale Superiore, Pisa
2
Università degli Studi di Siena, Arezzo
3
WebSoup s.n.c., Lucca
The cultural heritage preserved in some oral archives risks being loss because of the deterioration of
the carriers and the lack of methodological tools for conservation (Canazza et al. 2012). Grammofoni. Le soffitte della voce (Gra.fo), a project conducted by Scuola Normale Superiore of Pisa &
University of Siena and financed by Regione Toscana (PAR FAS 2007-2013), spotted, collected,
digitised, catalogued, and transcribed oral material recorded by scholars and amateurs in Tuscany.
Gra.fo provides an incredibly rich repository of Tuscan oral documents that have so far remained
invisible: tales, proverbs, songs, interviews, ethno-texts, linguistic questionnaires, and much more
(Calamai et al. 2013).
So far, more than 2800 hours of recording occupying nearly 2000 carriers (reel tapes and compact
cassettes) have been digitized. Yet, thanks to funding and active help from organizations and private
individuals, the collection of catalogued oral documents accessible via the Gra.fo web portal
(http://grafo.sns.it/) is ever-growing.
The sound documents, edited from the content of the carriers (on the basis of the information
contained in the recording, or in the accompanying material, or written on the carrier) and called
‘units of audio consultation’ (see infra), are put in relation with the original documents from which
they derive thanks to a database developed in MySQL which is populated by means of two ad hoc
applications, Grafo Preservation Panel and Grafo Panel, which make up and integrated system for
the management of the Gra.fo digital archive. These tools allow for the homogenization of the
information and data related to the preservation copies1 stemming from different archives, in
compliance with the European standards and through a systematic, coherent, detailed workflow.
The work aims at presenting the upgrade undergone by the two above-mentioned informatics tools.
Grafo Preservation Panel
Grafo Preservation Panel is a stand-alone application developed with Java that computerizes the
preservation process by allowing a series of semi-automated procedures for generating a preservation
copy, describing it by entering all the necessary information (resulting from the digitization process
and emerging from the metadata) in the database, managing the archive via the distribution of the
information and with the help of quality-check tools (as is the case with the collocation of all
documents within each preservation copy), and so on.
In addition, Grafo Preservation Panel carries out the transfer of the preservation copies to a server
for long-term conservation.
Grafo Panel
Grafo Panel (http://grafopanel.sns.it/) is a web application that enables the cataloguing of oral
documents following a protocol established by the Gra.fo research group (Calamai, 2012; Calamai,
Bertinetto 2014). The cataloguers (registered and authorized for the purpose) use this application to
create and fill in the cataloguing records related to the units of audio consultation, which correspond
to single linguistic events contained in the relative preservation copies2. The application allows
1
An organised set of data containing all the information present in the carrier together with its description and the
documentation of the conservation process.
2
While the preservation copy faithfully reproduces the original recording without considering its content, the ‘unit of
audio consultation’ derives from an interpretive process in which the cataloguer edits the original file and creates as
many different documents as the recorded events are.
cataloguers to enter information such as genre and topic, to edit a summary of the document, to
associate it with the relevant keywords and with the relevant interviewers and interviewees among
those catalogued in the software, to upload the related .pdf files (transcriptions and accompanying
materials), and much more.
In describing the units, cataloguers are helped by the presence of pull-down menus and text fields
that allow for uniformity of labelling and limit human errors. In addition, Grafo Panel has some
automated quality-check systems: for example, the creation of a new cataloguing record is impossible
without entering some specific information (title, language variety, archive to which the document
belongs). The upgrade of the software has brought about some improvements in the interface, which
is now more user-friendly, and, more importantly, in the performance of certain operations. For
example, while in the previous version the editing of the existing keywords and of the existing
information regarding interviewers and interviewees was restricted to the administrator of database,
now the operation can be carried out by the cataloguers and is thus less complicated and less timeconsuming. Another important improvement is the introduction of restrictions to the names of the
files that can be associated to the cataloguing records: since each cataloguing record has a specific
code and all the related files (.mp3 file containing the unit of audio consultation and .pdf files
containing transcriptions and accompanying materials) must be named with the same code, the
software only accepts files bearing the correct name. In addition, the new software does not allow a
cataloguer to log in as a fellow-cataloguer, a possibility given by the previous version: now
cataloguers can access the cataloguing records of their colleagues, but cannot modify them, which
makes the whole procedure safer.
All the information recorded in Grafo Panel converge in the same database containing the
information recorded in Grafo Preservation Panel about the original carriers. This ensures a safe
connection between the data derived from the digitisation process and those produced within the
cataloguing process.
Grafo Preservation Panel and Grafo Panel are two informatics tools optimised for the automation of
the processes of preservation (creation of preservation copies) and cataloguing (description of single
oral documents). They present two main advantages: 1. they allow for the check of data consistency
and 2. they are time-saving with respect to systems based on manual compilation.
References
Calamai, S. (2012), Ordinare archivi sonori: il progetto Gra.fo, Rivista Italiana di Dialettologia,
35.
Calamai S., P.M. Bertinetto (2014), Le soffitte della voce. Il progetto Grammo-foni, Vecchiarelli,
ISBN
88-8247-352-5.
Calamai S., F. Biliotti, P.M. Bertinetto, C. Bertini, I. Ricci, G. Scuotri (2013), "The Gra.fo sound
archive: architecture, methods and purpose", in A.C. Addison, G. Guidi, L. De Luca, S. Pescarin
(eds.), Proceedings of the 2013 Digital Heritage International Congress (DigitalHeritage), Institute of
Electrical and Electronics Engineers Inc., 2013: 439 [ISBN: 978-1-4799-3169-9].
Canazza S., S. Calamai, P.M. Bertinetto, A. De Dominicis (2012), “A protocol for the preservation
of speech documents archives: towards the digital curation of the Carta dei Dialetti Italiani”, in
Proceedings of the 5th International Congress Science and Technology for the Safeguard of Cultural
Heritage in the Mediterranean Basin, Istanbul, Turkey, 22nd-25th November 2011, vol. IV, pp. 8493.